Some of those are in fact possible...however based on quite a few articles detailing what exactly happened, I have to say again that this very much in fact is a royal screw up.

More information:

http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/12/06/1312254.shtml

and

http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/12/06/1312254.shtml

and

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/06/eve-online-update-fubars-gamers

If you Google Game deleted boot.ini file you will find even more articles on the topic.

"The problem is, the installer is supposed to delete an Eve file called boot.ini, but a programmer messed up and told it to delete "\boot.ini" instead of "boot.ini" so it will attempt to delete the file from the root of whatever drive Eve is installed on rather than from the (current) Eve folder."

If you are using a file that has the same name as a critical system file and will be affecting said file, why wouldn't you go back and double and triple check that you entered it correctly? Yes, this particular situation is rare, but so are applications that use the same name as critical system files. Is that any excuse?

It's not uncommon for all of QA (and everyone else) to have the same system configurations, since the tech support people would go insane otherwise.

Another possibility is that they *don't* reboot very often. I think you were joking there, but it's not that far-fetched.

If there are very many of 'em you'd think that at least one of them would have rebooted, but that might not have been sufficient on its own to indicate a bug with the game.

Say you have a department full of people and suddenly, a day or two after the last major revision to the game, one morning, one of 'em is having PC problems, despite his PC having been working just fine the night before and the game not having been changed in the meantime.

Odds are you'd send that guy to the IT department thinking his computer problems are unrelated to the game, especially since every other time it has happened (one person having PC problems while everyone else is still good: over the years, maybe quite a few times), the problem actually *was* unrelated to the game.

Anyway, this sort of thing makes you think "royal screw up", etc. but really - it's not so rare due to it requiring a rare mistake to be made, but is just rare on its own.

*No one* tests for issues like these *because* they are so rare.

Well, that is, no one except the developers who've been bitten by something like this before... but they have better odds of being struck by lightning twice, and insisting that someone verify the nigh impossible has not in fact occurred every single day would make them appear to be insane.

Much more likely though, is that no in QA met the criteria to be impacted by the bug in the first place:

**You must have at least 2 hard disks and the OS must be installed NOT on the primary, but the secondary hard disk.**

Seriously, who *does* that?

wow thats gotta suck for those who got affected.

... oops?@ omg wtf

I just want to know why a game even has any business going anywhere near the boot.ini file. This is a royal screw up in epic proportions.

I would guess QA doesn't reboot very often.

This is ridiculous, how did this get through QA?

OMG It got me. Thanks for the heads up..